Persona1.3

Overview

Persona is an innovative character development tool for fiction writers. Persona aids you in crafting archetypal themed characters and plots by using time-honored psychological principles to describe the motivations and interactions between different characterizations of people. Whether your story's hero is a brainiac talking fish or your villainess is an outcast orphanage owner, Persona helps you explore how each character's unique psychology and background influences their dealings and dialogue. Readers long for engrossing, character-driven narratives, but even the most experienced storytellers struggle to create strong, compelling characters. Persona is a unique and inspiring app that helps you organize and centralize your character data. Categorize characters by archetypes, fill in crucial background data, and more. If lack of inspiration is hurting your craft, you need a creative kickstart -- get Persona today!

What's new in Persona

Version 1.3:

Note: Now requires a 64-bit Intel processor

Updated security code and Apple suggested settings

Compiled for 64-bit only using the latest Apple compiler

General bug fixes and performance enhancements

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How would you rate Persona app?

12 Reviews of Persona

Now it is at v1.1 this is looking like a proper writer's app. Still a long way to go but, as with all Mariner apps, this will just get better and better. I wish I would have waited to hop on at this price. It is an outstanding value for what will become a very useful and even important app for writers.
Recommendation: Buy at the sale price of less than $20.
Then just sit back and read and read and read. Well worth the price of admission now.

Fabulous app. I've tried a few writing apps from Mariner and I'm always pleasantly surprised. I've been dabbling with a script for a while now but could never get the characters to effectively co-exist with each other. With Persona I've exposed the problem and corrected it. Probably works for novelists too.

Persona is a great example—perhaps the great example–of software that can increase the creativity of anyone writing about people. I say ‘writing about people’ rather than ‘writing characters’ because nonfiction writers who use people in their writing benefit as much as a fiction writer.
My background is in French Literature, so when I think of characters, I think of poor Honoré de Balzac. This man wrote a magnum opus called La comédie humaine, a series of 91 works that gives us a remarkably detailed, almost anthropological look at life during and after the 1815 fall of Napoléon Bonaparte. And yes, I said 91 works, mostly novels, whose characters came and went throughout the entire work.
Balzac had so many characters to manage that he did two rather unusual things to keep them straight in his mind. First, for each of his fictional families, he created a crest, then collected the hundreds of crests into an Armorial. If you visit his house in Paris (now a musée) you can buy a copy of this Armorial, which, when unfolded, extends to well over six feet in length. And this is just for his characters who lived in Paris. There’s another for those who peppered the French country landscape.
While visiting his house, you also see rows and rows of dolls sitting on shelves that extend around the entire circumference of his writing room. Balzac, wearing a white linen monk’s robe and downing quarts of extremely strong coffee, would use these dolls as memory aids. After all, there are more than 2000 characters in La Comedie Humaine. Just listing the characters is a book in itself (really — two Frenchmen completed a Repertory of Balzac’s work, and it was the size of a novel.
Imagine the help that Persona would have been to him. He was in a continual write-revise-submit cycle, so hundreds of characters could be actively involved in his day-to-day writing. Persona could obviate the need for a room full of dolls, since names, physical characteristics, body type, ethnicity, and lots else, are default information fields for every Persona character. In addition, backgrounds, hobbies, occupations, and, something that would have seemed a miracle to Balzac, Character Connections, are all organized for each character. And since old habits die hard, Persona solves more of the Balzac problem by allowing a photo for each character. The photo can be an actual person, but a picture of a doll works just as well.
Persona is meant to be used from the beginning, when characters are created. There are 16 archetypes each for men and women. As your conception of the character develops, Persona keeps track of the details. The character can morph and change as you plan your work, and Persona keeps track of every detail.
My use of the software shows that it allows plenty of degrees of freedom for a writer to fully specify a character. Some details aren’t type-anything-you-want-style blanks, but rather are drop-down lists for the author to pick from. And since there are so many possibilities for the numerous character details, the right third of the software window is devoted to detailed explanations of each choice. For example, you may create a character whose archetype (chosen from a list) is a Standard Bearer. Persona allows for two kinds of standard bearers: an Altruist and a Concerned Citizen (which are chosen from a list). It is not obvious to the beginning user of the software what these terms mean. And they mean a lot. Hence, the large amount of space assigned to describing the choices. You know what you are making.
Long-time users of Persona may see the perpetual sight of these explanations as a problem. A welding on of training wheels. It's a valid point, but I have been using the software for a good while, and still appreciate the descriptions.
Earlier, I said that a non-fiction writer could use Persona as much as the fiction writer could. As an example, I’m just looking up to my television, which is showing a documentary on Barney Frank. The documentarians used lots of congressmen, senators, party leaders, constituents, and others. Each person is in the documentary for a reason. The film certainly has a point of view, and the characters are interviewed and used to progress the documentation of Barney Frank’s life. There are a few dozen people, and their characteristics matter. You use professional politicians to make some points, concerned citizens to make others. Persona fits right into the toolbox of the filmmaker who has to keep up with this cohort of people.
As with other database-like software, all of the characteristics are sortable and group able. Macintosh owners will be familiar with Smart Folders from using email and iTunes. Essentially, a Smart folder is a container for all the characters who meet certain criteria. So you can look at all your female villains. Or altruistic congressmen. Finding characters, keeping score of the character types in your population, gaining an instant census of them is literally two clicks away.
If you are a person who relies on building characters as part of their living, Persona is for you. Everything about your creations is available, sortable, and mutable. When using Persona, your characters can’t hide from you, so you won’t have a character change eye color in the middle of your work.

Persona is a wonderful complement to simple text editors. Instead of installing sluggish and slow professional software for writing novels, just a minimalist text editor (eg. Zen Writer) and Persona. Persona is a complete manager of characters in a novel or a script. It contains everything you need and at the same time does not take much in the surfaced disk and does not slow down the operating system. If you are a writer or a writer of books then this program is the best option for you. Even if you have purchased already Scrinever, this persona is its great compliment.

Just an observation.... If you need these tools to flesh out your characters, to make them "real," to make them believable, and to act/react to other characters and situations, then perhaps you have not looked into the souls of your characters. A true writer/novelist does not have to rely on software tricks based on movie clichés and prototyes; the best characters are the ones that write their own storylines, that take the author by surprise. You don't need software for this. You need imagination.

I was using other apps of this developer and when they introduced persona I purchased it instantly: what a mistake i made!
I will mention my 3 biggest complaints about this program:
- Say no to dropbox/cloud programs. As a creative person you often work in other places but Persona does not work in dropbox or cloud solutions, it popups up that the file has been edited and ask you to save it anyways (which never succeeds) or reverts, which always blanks out the entire file. Thank you mariner!
- Incomplete : The software and the suggestions are incomplete the build a character and it clear they based this program on one or two films instead of looking at multiple films.
- Its the outside which matters : The software focusses more on the outside of a person instead of personal dilemma's, setups/payoffs etc. A shame.
I do not recommend it and I warn you to not use this program until mariner starts acting like a professional company again.

Now it is at v1.1 this is looking like a proper writer's app. Still a long way to go but, as with all Mariner apps, this will just get better and better. I wish I would have waited to hop on at this price. It is an outstanding value for what will become a very useful and even important app for writers.
Recommendation: Buy at the sale price of less than $20.
Then just sit back and read and read and read. Well worth the price of admission now.

I think it is my fault, but this is not what I had expected. I had hoped to build-up a comprehensive profile of each character, then to either have printed, copied into Scrivener or even better... to have exported the whole project, links and all... to a mini website, where I could quickly follow the links to each character and be offered differing layouts (Family connections, groups, friendships, histories etc...).
The program 'seems' to be centred around it pulling info from a database, based on what you chose from various drop-down menus (ie type - leader, follower etc...). Whereas I had thought it was a way to build my characters and then export them in such a manner as to be helpful, which it does not.
Software however cheap or reduced, really should offer more than this. My guess is they will either drop it, or offer better export options in the future... especially the mini site idea... which if done well, could be invaluable.

Seems that Mariner is trying to work the entire scope of the writing process with this offering. I do use Contour and StoryMill from Mariner, and personally, glad to see an app like this. I do agree that there is a lot of “free” information already available, but I like having some of that information readily accessible, which is what Persona does for me. I am intelligent enough to know that the profiles and personalities shown here are not comprehensive, but there is plenty of information that will serve to get me started on a character and to think about some aspects of a character’s personality I might have otherwise missed. I also appreciate the juxaposition of personalities. I consider this a “springboard” type of product. As far as price, I am a firm believer of supporting the small (or mid-size - whichever Mariner claims to be) company, perhaps now more than ever.
Overall, Persona is a good “first effort.” It does need a bit of tweaking but again, I have used it as a starting point for my writing and pretty satisfied with it.

Hi Logan, good to see you watch what folks think. My concerns - and suggestions, are in the short review. No need to go 'back door' to discuss this. Others might offer useful insights if you let the discussion out into the open air.
Writers - your market for Persona - need to copy and paste stuff they work on from apps that are not part of their normal workflow. That would be a good place to start. But I'm sure you are on to it.
I can go out to the internet to find this stuff (ie any Enneagrams, Myers Briggs, DSM 4 and 5, and a dozen other archetype and tropes sites I am too polite to mention) and copy stuff that I deem relevant to my specific task at hand.
Remember that the main reasons for writers even looking at 'character interaction' stuff in the first place are to enable more accurate character typing and to make sense of how characters of different types rub against each other and that is all over the net. Yes, Persona does that to a limited extent but it keeps it to itself and it constrains the insights to a limited repertoire - comprehensive, but still limited.
I would find Persona more useful if I could endow it with my own research on character.
Also I am sure you will recall that when I suggested this type of app a couple of years back it was to integrate with Contour and Montage and StoryMill and MacJournal. That would be powerful - even if it was a bunch of nearly empty boxes the user could add to.
For example, I am interested in the tropes most associated in the reader's mind with Mysteries, Detective stories and Children's Adventure stories and I do not need to delve into Romance, Horror or Sci-Fi. So character development applications - such as Character Writer and Persona are compared one for one against that frame of reference.
Character Writer lets me build character profiles relevant to my needs based on Enneagrams, Personality Profiles, Diagnostic Psychology, Background, Dialogue, Relationships and so on and make the web of insights I produce immediately available for my work - with a real sense of authenticity about the characters. I can add what I want to Character Writer - or for that matter my Scrivener character profiles - not have it proscribed for me as Persona does - and I can't copy my work form Persona to my Scrivener or StoryMill, or Montage, or Contour workspace anyway so it is absolutely unusable as it is.
Yes, I was disappointed that you released this app when it could not even export its files to anything. That function is primary for a writer.
Having said that, would I use Persona? Yes, definitely, if it allowed me to export text. Frankly, it is overpriced compared function for function with Character Writer ($49) and Dramatica Story Expert ($69) and even the new Windows app, Character Pro ($65) which combines Character profiling with Quick Story.
And because price is an issue, Persona adds very little, if anything, to the wealth of free information on the internet - so why not make Persona a tool to use that free information. As it is at the moment it just will not do the job.

So what do you do with your character notes after you have built one? You can't export any data. You don't seem to be able to copy data either - so you can't paste it into your work. I can only think to PRINT, but do a 'save as pdf' when the print window comes up.
The app is so promising but at the moment it is a pale imitation of Character Writer. The archetype list is far too narrow - it is all available on the internet for free - and you can use what is there as you need to when you need to how you need to.
No Export - I don't believe it. Mariner does not work like that - this is a premature release, a very premature release.